A Lookback Scheduling Framework for Long-Term Quality-of-Service Over Multiple Cells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Long-term Lookback Scheduling framework that enhances cellular network resource allocation by incorporating long-term QoS data, leading to better long-term user satisfaction without compromising short-term performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Long-term Lookback Scheduling framework that integrates past cell information into resource allocation, improving long-term QoS in cellular networks.

Findings

Significant improvements in long-term QoS metrics.

Maintains short-term user requirements effectively.

Flexible trade-off between immediate and long-term QoS.

Abstract

In current cellular networks, schedulers allocate wireless channel resources to users based on instantaneous channel gains and short-term moving averages of user rates and queue lengths. By using only such short-term information, schedulers ignore the users' service history in previous cells and, thus, cannot guarantee long-term Quality of Service (QoS) when users traverse multiple cells with varying load and capacity. In this paper, we propose a new Long-term Lookback Scheduling (LLS) framework, which extends conventional short-term scheduling with long-term QoS information from previously traversed cells. We demonstrate the application of LLS for common channel-aware, as well as channel and queue-aware schedulers. The developed long-term schedulers also provide a controllable trade-off between emphasizing the immediate user QoS or the long-term measures. Our simulation results show high gains in long-term QoS without sacrificing short-term user requirements. Therefore, the proposed scheduling approach improves subscriber satisfaction and increases operational efficiency.